Helping the homeless

By Amy Geiszler-Jones

Living on the streets can be devastating, but the homeless who are mentally ill have two strikes against them.

But one strategy — integrating the efforts of service agencies — gives the homeless mentally ill a chance to turn around their lives, according to research being conducted by WSU’s Self-Help Network.

Since 1993, the Self-Help Network and a coalition of service agencies in Wichita and Topeka have been part of a national project aimed at determining if “community integrated systems will have better individual outcomes for homeless mentally ill,” says Greg Meissen, executive director of the Self-Help Network.

Supported by the National Institutes for Health, Project ACCESS is being conducted at 18 sites in nine states. At one site in each state, services were integrated, while at the other site in the state, services were merely enhanced. The Self-Help Network, housed in WSU’s psychology department, was tapped to track the success of the project in Kansas. WSU has received nearly $1.5 million in NIH grants for its part.

The research has played a vital role, says Rick Goscha, who was director of Sedgwick County’s COMCARE homeless program during the project. Using data from the Self-Help Network, the agency realized it wasn’t hitting as many target clients in the first year of ACCESS.

“We used their research to turn around our program,” says Goscha. Armed with the information from interviews with ACCESS partipants, Goscha and others developed a very successful program that helped more homeless mentally ill get and keep housing and jobs and go back to school.

When the Kansas participants received services through coordinated efforts, they reduced their symptoms by 45 percent, more than 70 percent found housing and twice as many found jobs.

Matt Shepherd, who will earn his doctorate in community-clinical psychology in May, has interviewed homeless mentally ill since Project ACCESS started in 1993. He, along with a handful of other researchers, do extensive initial interviews, then follow-up interviews at three-, 12- and 18-month intervals to track how the participants were doing.

Interviews with ACCESS participants will conclude in December.

The interviews take dogged determination on the part of Shepherd and other researchers, but they have been very successful, surpassing the average follow-up interview rate for other ACCESS sites by 10 percent. The WSU researchers were able to track down 90 percent of the participants at the three-month interval, and 80 percent for the annual interview.

Shepherd, who has done more than 1,000 interviews, employs various tactics. He interviews wherever participants feel comfortable — “I’ve done them in shelters, in Center City (the centralized service location on 21st and Broadway), in the back of my truck, parking lots, soup kitchens, McDonald’s.”

He usually gathers names of folks they stay in regular contact with so he can do follow-up interviews. Sometimes he has to resort to old-fashioned sleuthing, like using library fine information or mail service changes.

Through these interviews, he has developed a number of profiles of the homeless in Kansas. He also used the project for his dissertation, which garnered him a national award from the American Psychological Association and the American Psychological Foundation.

Shepherd found that the average ACCESS client was 36 years old and has had 12 years of education. The majority of the clients had previously been hospitalized for psychiatric care, spending nearly 18 months in local and state hospitals.

He also developed other profiles, including the ever-increasing segment of homeless young single women with children and the working poor.

The research is also there to help drive policy, Meissen says, and that’s happened already, too. Last year, Kansas’ social and rehabilitation services secretary held discussions on SRS policies. The coalition from Project ACCESS was there, able to support their position that integrated services work.

Another positive outcome of the project is that service providers started viewing each other as partners instead of competitors, Meissen says. For example, once Venture House realized two other nearby shelters provided lunches, it discontinued that service and concentrated on other services that were less readily available.

WSU's Self-Help Network has been part of a nationwide project to help the homeless mentally ill. One of the programs that started under Project ACCESS is People's Net, a self-help program. WSU doctoral student Matt Shepherd, left, and Greg Meissen, executive director of the Self-Help Network, right, visit with People's Net supervisor Jim Hamilton at the program's offices.